עברית "by a sudden impetus a certain secret will be inspired into man from the spiritual world, namely, what the other man really is".
In this sentence you will find the foundation stone of our entire work in the global school of spiritual science and the global event college. Here the community building by means of the reversed cultus begins, continues, and culminates!
“A time will come — and it must not pass unnoticed — when out of the spiritual world men will receive an impulse that will kindle a far deeper interest in every individual human being than we are inclined to have to-day. This enhanced interest in our fellow-men will not unfold in the subjective, leisurely way that people would prefer, but by a sudden impetus a certain secret will be inspired into man from the spiritual side, namely, what the other man really is. By this I mean something quite concrete — not any kind of theoretical consideration. Men will learn something whereby their interest in every individual can be kindled. That is the one point — and that is what will particularly affect the social life”.
Rudolf Steiner, lecture of 9th October 1918, GA 182
A closer esoteric study of the mysteries of the human meeting as a spiritual event is given in the 7th chapter of The New Experience of the Supersensible, entitled: Christ's Appearance Between "I" and "Thou"
The New Experience of the Supersensible
From Chapter 7: Christ’s Appearance between ‘I’ and ‘Thou'
At the heart of the mutually crossing and turning inside-out and outside-in of the new Earth and Heaven—the centre and periphery of the new earthly-human Sun—there is still another, probably the deepest and most difficult, threshold or abyss that must be consciously bridged before a full realization of the Second Coming and a firm grounding of the Michael age will be possible. This abyss cuts its way of spirit forgetfulness between every two human beings that—the rational content of their daily consciousness notwithstanding—confront each other in modern social life. As the history of the Anthroposophical Society shows in many cases, this abyss surfaces clearly when a community strives to ground its spiritual life in the true existential situation of the consciousness soul. And this could not have been otherwise, for it is where the social-planetary wound behind the last two World Wars (and the current Third World War of the planet's survival) burns strongly. It becomes, imaginatively speaking, a virtual dark sunspot that emerges from the circulating rhythmical social heart and lung zone of the earthly-human Sun, at the most sensitive and vulnerable crossing and reversing place-time of the new Heaven and Earth.
This is the reason, therefore, for the absolute necessity of a radically new social life in our time. The etheric crucifixion, resurrection, teaching and initiatory acts of the etheric Christ are nowhere more readily perceived—and, because of that, also ignored—than here. The more crucial it becomes for our evolution the more we turn away from its cruel as well as exhilarating reality. But as long as we do so, we can acquire no conscious Imagination or intuitive power of realization in order to make the new earthly-human Sun a truly productive and life-giving cosmic being.
To transform social life into Christ-permeated daily reality: this is the most serious responsibility that human beings who have experienced the true nature of the Second Coming can take on themselves today. The modern Christ experience, as described in Chapter 4, is also the archetype and hidden ground of the new human meeting. The three stages of the meeting with the new Initiator are—on a different level the same stages that are found in every spiritually awakened human meeting. In the field of the powerful spiritual tension of morally active cognition, and cognition radiating morality, i.e. surrounded and penetrated by the new Earth and Heaven of the earthly-human Sun, the awakened human meeting can acquire a potency and depth hitherto unknown in human history.
In such a meeting every person that I meet is for me my initiator, bearing and suffering my cross, awakening me from my death of soul, profoundly teaching me my mysteries of evil, and gracefully blessing me with the mutual penetration and creative reversal of karmic responsibility.6But I can do the same for the other person. I can be his cross-bearer as well as his crucifier; I am his initiator as well as his pupil, for good or ill.
As Rudolf Steiner pointed out, this was and is the fundamental, basic rule of occultists; it must become the life habit of all those human beings who experience concretely and consciously the weaving and pulsating of the living Christ between members of the social community: 'It is a fundamental maxim of occultists to see the other person as the revelation of one's own Higher Self, because he knows then he must find the other in himself.
The anthroposophical foundations for our study here are to be found in Rudolf Steiner's researches concerning the deeper esoteric nature of the social question, communicated especially after the First World War, in the years 1918-19. The most important discovery of Rudolf Steiner, as far as human encounters are concerned, is especially crucial for our considerations here. In every meeting, Rudolf Steiner says, unconsciously-supersensibly, the participators always mutually cross the threshold as a result of the powerful spirit impact of the other. That is, they metamorphose their state of consciousness continuously with only very short, purely physical awakenings in between, changing their roles from being put to sleep by the other to the 'sleep inducer' of the other. The remarkable thing is, however, that a person is out of his balanced physical place (bodily space and time) in both cases. As sleeper, his soul and spirit members are briefly separated from the physical and etheric bodies, as in normal sleep. But as sleep inducer he incarnates too strongly, so as to suppress, or frighten, the other out of his skin into sleep. If excarnation in sleep means that we lose our stronghold in space and in physically measurable time—that is, we become space-and-timeless—so the reverse is true in our excessive incarnations. We are not satisfied with only one space-time centre; we wish, and do, overtake another. We actually strive to achieve unlimited space-infilling omnipotence by extending our physical soul might in order to conquer, by spiritually-spatially densifying ourselves, the body of another, sending him to sleep—and vice versa. In the one case, sleeping, we become too social; we efface our presence altogether, giving way completely to the other by annulling our daily consciousness. In the other case, we become fearfully awakened and antisocial, suppressing the other's independent self-consciousness.